Birmingham City Council website wins two Lovie Awards
Birmingham City Council has won a Gold award and a People’s Choice award at the Lovies, Europe’s leading awards organisation honouring excellence in design and user experience on the internet.
The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS), which selects the Lovie Award Winners, named Birmingham City Council ‘Gold Winner’ in the ‘Websites, Government & Civic’ category.
IADAS is comprised of Internet industry experts including Musician Imogen Heap, Dan Howell (danisnotonfire), Actor/Writer Stephen Fry, Vic Hayes (“‘Father of Wi-Fi”), Robin Chase (Founder, Buzzcar), Alexander Ljung, Founder & CEO of Soundcloud and Corinne Vigreux (Co-Founder, TomTom).
The new Birmingham City Council website also received the ‘People’s Lovie’ in the same ‘Websites, Government & Civic’ category’, which is decided by public vote.
The new birmingham.gov.uk website was launched in August 2016. Spacecraft Digital had been tasked with an entire rebrand of the website and engaging Birmingham’s residents every step of the way.
Paula Buckley, assistant director, customer service at Birmingham City Council, said: “It’s fantastic to win any Lovie but we’re particularly pleased to win the public vote.
"The interaction and feedback from residents and regular website users was crucial to the redesign. It was central to everything we did. That people are benefiting from the new site is all we could have asked for - the Lovie awards, as with the Webby, act as icing on the cake!"
The Lovie Award win comes off the back of the new site receiving official Honouree status in the 2017 Webby Awards, in April of this year.
Matt Culpin, Creative Director at Spacecraft Digital said: “Mobile responsiveness and accessibility were absolutely key to our mission. We did a lot of discovery work with customers throughout the process and spent time analysing the data of the previous site. User testing was conducted throughout the design and build process and we were laser focused on establishing and defining user needs.
“Eye tracking also played a big part, once something had been created; it was presented to people for us to gather evidence into what their eyes were drawn to. We were able to see heatmaps of where people were looking and test pathways based on specific tasks. The result was a redesign based on thorough intelligence!”
Birmingham City Council is Europe’s largest local authority serving over one million customers and its website attracts 4,486,793 unique visitors a year.
The 7th Annual Lovie Awards will be presented at a ceremony on Thursday 16th November 2017 at Picturehouse Central in London.
